November 27, 2008

My Advice to the "Next Right": Ideology -> Strategy -> Message

[A front pager at The Next Right asked a leading question, "What comes first - the ideas or the message?", and I left the following as a comment.]

I'm a liberal, so take my input for what you think it's worth:

You all are focusing on the wrong dichotomy of ideas v. message. The
progression has to be ideas (or more accurately, ideology, which is not
a dirty word), followed by designing a strategy to vindicate that
ideology, which then leads you to craft a message to execute that
strategy.

Movement conservatism did this very well until recently. Here's my
rundown of that history with my "harsh lefty tilt": You had disparate
groups of people who regarded themselves as conservatives milling about
with no direction in the 60s. These included racists who were appalled
at the federal government protecting the civil rights of
African-Americans, cold warriors with Maoist-like beliefs that constant
conflict and perhaps even nuclear war with Communist Russia was
inevitable and even desirable, religious fundamentalists enraged and
baffled at the sexual revolution and the liberation of gays and women
from traditional norms, and the wealthy who were convinced that the New
Deal and the Great Society would bankrupt the country (and them).

The ideology of conservatism is based on the idea that people are
basically evil, and that a successful society creates traditional norms
and institutions in spite of and in order to control that evil. In this
view, good people were obligated to use power in order to keep everyone
else in line and prevent social changes that almost certainly would
lead to bad results. The strategy that developed was to sell this idea
to the various conservative factions on the theme of virtuous strength
v. degenerate weakness.

To the racists, conservatism could say, "You're right. You are the
noble white people who built Western Civilization and the United
States, the greatest country on Earth. Now these darkies want to take
it all away." To the fanatical anti-communists, conservatism could say,
"You're right. Capitalism is the highest form of human virtue because
it requires people to compete for resources and demonstrate their skill
and intelligence in a true meritocracy. Anything that hinders that
competition is evil, and Communism is the quintessence of evil - it is
an international conspiracy solely meant to destroy capitalism." To the
religious wackos, conservatism could say, "You're right. God the Father
preordained the natural state of things that should be reflected in
human society, but Satan is leading these sluts and sodomites astray.
You are the good people who are doing God's work in fighting their evil
ways." To the rich, conservatism could say, "You're right. The mob of
poor have discovered that they can vote themselves funds from the
public treasury, from your pocket, and if they succeed they'll never
work again and society will collapse. We have to stop them."

From there, you could cross-market. The obvious thing would be to
unite the messages aimed at the anti-communists and the rich, inspiring
the anti-communists to venerate wealth (even if they weren't wealthy
themselves) and the rich to provide funding for the cold war
infrastructure (even if they thought the Pentagon and CIA examples of
bloated, big-spending government). It was also easy to get the
religious and the anti-communists together over the subject of atheism
both at home and abroad. For another example, you could sell the idea
to both the racists and the religious that the worst sexual degenerates
were blacks.

But the real genius was discovering a focal point for all these
positions. Uniting all of these ideas was that the evil people used
government to effect the changes that each conservative group was
trying to oppose. Thus, the party of small government was born. Even an
anti-communism in the form of a large military was a doctrine of small
government - if you think of International Communism as the ultimate
form of big government.

Armed with an ideological strategy that could appeal to various
groups, movement conservatism then turned to crafting an electoral
strategy. The key, of course, was the South. That had the largest
concentration of votes in each of the racist, religious and
anti-communist blocs. (The rich are there for their money, not their
votes, since there aren't enough of them.) The putrid heart of this
regional strategy was racism and the regional paranoia that remained
from the Civil War. Southern conservatives viewed themselves as a
separate, more noble society under constant attack from the outside.
This feeling of being under siege solidified the South for the GOP for
decades. From this base of North-South conflict, conservatism then
aimed at pitting the suburbs (the rich and the anticommunists) and the
rural areas (racists and the religious) against the cities (blacks, the
poor, homosexuals, and feminists).

The rest is uncontroversial. The right used the money of the rich
and the troops provided by the churches to create what liberals called "the Mighty Wurlitzer", which is:

a propaganda machine that can hone a fact or a lie, broadcast it, and have it echoed and recycled in Fox News commentary, in Washington Times news stories, in Wall Street Journal
editorials, by myriad right-wing pundits, by Heritage seminars and
briefing papers, and in congressional hearings and speeches.
Privatization of Social Security, vouchers for school, Vince Foster's
supposed murder, Hillary's secret sex life, you name it -- the right's
mighty Wurlitzer can ensure that a message is broadcast across the
county, echoed in national and local news, and reverberated in the
speeches of respectable academics as well as rabid politicians.

This propelled Reagan to power, but the plan began to fall apart in
the 90s when Gingrich and the Congressional Republicans overreached and
shut down the government. Like the Beer Hall Putsch, like the Tet
Offensive, the revolutionaries thought their bold act would result in a
glorious uprising of the people! And it turned out, the people hated
it. Oops. Anti-government conservatives running government is like the
dog who chases cars but when he finally catches one, he doesn't know
what to do with it.

People, it turned out, wanted efficient but effective government,
and while they bought into the strength v. weakness rhetoric, weakness
was to them always exemplified by the government program someone else liked, not the one they liked. The capstone was Bush's hands-off approach, which resulted in nightmares like Katrina and now the financial crisis.

It gets worse: The demographics are against you. The hardcore
racists, religious bigots and anti-communists are all old now. (See the
exit polls for any of the successful anti-gay marriage referenda - the
young people hated them.) Old people like big government programs like
Medicare and Social Security, so what's left to cut? The former
communists are our buddies now, and the Muslims aren't scary enough to
take their place, it turns out. Finally, the South is no longer Solid.
Yankees are moving in. Blacks got their act together and are in
political control across large swaths of the region.

The linkage between conservative thought, an ideological strategy
aimed at various unaffiliated and disaffected groups, and an electoral
strategy aimed at a winning number of states and Congressional
districts, is broken. You need to forge a new one. The important step
is to identify the current or emerging unaffiliated and disaffected
groups, and determine if by uniting them you could seize power again.
If so, then craft the message that will unite them. Who those
groups are, I really don't know. I think you're just going to have to
effectively hang out for a decade or two and see what develops that you
can run on.

If I could help you, I wouldn't, of course. You're all pretty evil
in both your purpose and in effect. Movement conservatism is a theology
of hate that has perpetuated some of the worst aspects of the American
character. I've been as honest in this post as I can be, but maybe the
fact that I think you're bad people colored my analysis and made it
seem more hopeless for you in the short run than it really is. Perhaps
you can get the old gang back together by, say, convincing religious
blacks and Hispanics that gays and sluts are the real menace. I don't
think it will work, but please - go ahead and try.

Comments

Great thumbnail sketch of modern American conservatism! Of course, the 'real', 'authentic' conservatives began to jump ship about two years ago and in recent days are falling all over themselves in an attempt to distance themselves from the crack-up. Although, it is difficult to see a new ascendency that would commandingly recapture the political summits again, I think they are far from done - the blood lust, pleasure of obstruction and demonization of the 'enemy' is the group's high. They do not need to accomplish anything out of power anymore than they had any real desire to govern while in power. Holding back time and vandalizing the present is the right's raison d'etre. There will be no bipartisanship, just the biding of time for future ambushes. Endlessly. We can only hope that they have warn out the public's patience at long last and that politicians like Obama are thinking at a much higher structural level so that they are not sucked into the manufactured morass that is the main product line of the GOP.